Thursday, 15 December 2016

The road to Mosul

The road to Mosul

Mosul, Iraq -- There are only about 80 kilometres (50
miles) between Arbil, the developing capital of the Iraqi Kurdish
region, and Mosul, the last remaining Iraqi city held by the Islamic
State group. But as I learned during two weeks covering the Mosul
offensive, sometimes it only takes a few dozen kilometers to go from one
universe to another, passing surreal worlds along the way.

AFP photographers, video-journalists,
drivers and I crossed those 80 kilometres almost every day, navigating
poorly-paved roads, checkpoints, and towns scarred by both the
jihadists’ two-year reign and the brutal battles it took to reach their
last bastion in Mosul.

Our coverage was from that front line
inside the city. But the journey itself -- the descent from bustling
Arbil into war-battered Mosul -- was a story in its own right.

Every morning, we piled our flak jackets,
helmets, laptops, cameras, and notebooks into an SUV and left Arbil
with its ubiquitous shisha waterpipes, even in hair salons. We pulled
onto the highway heading west, sleep-deprived and less talkative day by
day.

We often stopped to buy fresh fruit in the town of Kalak, whose defining
landmark is an inexplicably large fish statue. As we sped across the
bumpy gravel towards the first set of checkpoints, the bags of bananas
and oranges would be violently tossed around in the car’s trunk for
nearly an hour. Once I made a tired joke about a fruit salad. No one
laughed.

It was my first time working in Iraq, so navigating the maze of checkpoints taught me quite a few lessons, and fast.

First, checkpoints come in all shapes and
sizes. Just because the single soldier leaning on a dirty plastic chair
appears less intimidating than the two-story bunker surrounded by
concrete barriers doesn’t mean that he’s less likely to make you wait
nervously for an hour before turning you back.

Second -- and this will sound trite, but
it’s the best way I can think of putting it -- getting through
checkpoints is like baking a cake, but the recipe changes every day.
Sometimes you need a little less grinning and more making the right
phone calls; other times, the perfect mix is an array of notebooks and
cameras in the backseat and a familiar face manning the crossing.

Our first two checkpoints every morning
were run by Kurdish security forces who peered over aviators at our
press cards, then scribbled our names on a scrap of paper that we were
to hand to the final Kurdish-manned security point less than 30
kilometres from Mosul.

Once we passed that point, we were in
Iraqi federal territory, where the crossings were held by a mix of
police, army soldiers, and Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) forces. For
the first week, we could usually spot a familiar face -- like the lanky
red-headed CTS fighter with a neon scarf -- and breezed through the last
remaining checkpoint towards Mosul.

But by week two, the officers to whom we
had become accustomed were flown to Baghdad for a break and a new
contingent was manning the ultimate crossing.

“I don’t care how many times you were here
last week, I don’t know you,” barked one CTS fighter, his eyes hidden
behind plastic sunglasses and the rest of his face covered by a black
balaclava.

We looked nervously at our driver, who opted for the charm-while-name-dropping strategy.

“Brother, you must have been on break from
this difficult battle. We know how tired you’re getting, since we’ve
been embedded with Commander Muntazar every day. Karkukli really is a
tough neighbourhood,” our driver said smoothly.

The stern officer raised his eyebrows --
the only facial feature left uncovered -- and waved us through with a
nudge of his rifle.

Once we cleared the last checkpoint, there
was a 12-kilometre stretch of highway to the edge of Mosul proper. The
golden plains gave way to what was once some kind of industrial zone,
with hand-painted signs hanging over pastel-coloured shops on both sides
of the road in Gogjali, the last district before reaching Mosul. Every
day we passed signs like: “The Barbershop of Peace,” “Fiberglass of
Love,” and “The Industrial Mosque.”

In most of this post-apocalyptic
wasteland, ravaged by two years under IS and the fighting and bombing
that forced the jihadists west, there wasn’t a soul in sight. Truck
carcasses burned to a crisp lay on their side by storefronts with no
windows or doors. Twisted metal gates bore messy graffiti identifying
the garages as Sunni Muslim property, meaning they would be spared in
the sectarian fighting in this area of Iraq.

At times it felt as if the shops had been
abandoned decades ago, and we were driving through a harmless, if
rusted, monument to a long-forgotten conflict. Other days it was almost
like the storefronts were just worn-down two-dimensional models of a
real town somewhere else. Think Blazing Saddles meets The Walking Dead
meets… Mosul, I guess.

As we got closer, we could see more people
strolling among the destroyed shops and homes -- if this was a ghost
town, they were its ghosts. In early November, their faces were gaunt
and almost expressionless. But day by day, life seeped slowly,
unstoppable, back into the purgatory that was Gogjali.

One day, we noticed a shop reopen to serve
as a distribution point for bottles of water. Later in the week, a
teenage boy peddled a few packs of cigarettes and cheap biscuits splayed
across an old wooden cart. When my colleague Rouba el-Husseini drove
through about ten days later, Gogjali was vibrant -- residents had set
up full-fledged fruit and vegetable stalls, butcher shops, and sweets
stands.

On days when the battlefronts were
relatively quiet, convoys of charter buses and construction trucks would
whizz past us towards Khazer, carrying dozens of terrified families out
of Mosul and towards any one of several camps for displaced people. But
if instead we saw ambulances, sirens wailing as they zipped towards
hospitals in Arbil, we knew it was already a bloody day for the city.

Gogjali’s low buildings soon fell away.
Straight ahead was Mosul’s eastern entrance, still held by IS. And to
our left, a massive cemetery also controlled by IS militants. So we
swung a right onto a dirt road, entering the labyrinth of residential
blocks that make up the eastern outskirts of Mosul.

After slicing through various stratospheres to reach it, we found Mosul had its own layers.

The first was made up of blocks of
two-storey homes, each of them with a small front yard or garage that
was sealed off from the main road by a metal gate painted with vibrant
designs. Children peered at our car from behind teal and burgundy gates,
and elderly men waved as they crouched in groups in front of
golden-embossed doorways.

In that first layer, you could be forgiven
for forgetting that you were entering a warzone. But as we zigzagged
deeper into the eastern edges, swapping our SUV for a CTS Humvee and
donning our flak jackets and helmets along the way, the scenery got
progressively more militarised, and dangerous.

Layer two featured the low hum of
warplanes circling above, and rowdy Iraqi units using empty homes as
bases. The decaying bodies of alleged IS fighters lay crumpled in
ditches for days.

The few civilians we did see were busying
themselves with sweeping their front stoops -- a gesture that, at the
time, I found incomprehensible given the context. But the more I saw
them do it, the more it made sense. It was indeed a defiant attempt to
return to normalcy, but perhaps it was also a gesture of realism.

Umm Ahmad moved in with her brother-in-law
after CTS forces began using her home as one of their forward operating
bases in the Samah district. Even as mortars crashed around her
neighbourhood, she said she’d rather scrape out a living in
partially-liberated Mosul “than go to a refugee camp, where I don’t know
what will happen to me or my family.”

Mosul’s third layer -- and our final stop
-- was the front line, which moved anywhere between five and ten blocks
further into the city every day. Some days it was unbearably quiet, as
CTS forces fortified their positions ahead of an early-morning push the
following day.

The typical soundtrack to layer three was
the crack of sniper fire, the occasional boom of a car bomb, and the
incessant beeping and crackling voices of CTS forces communicating by
walkie-talkie to give orders and coordinates, in flourish-filled Arabic
that seemed at odds with the urgency of the situation.

“My heart! The light of my eyes! You are
the heroes of Iraq, may God protect you. My soul, my heroes! But for
God’s sake get out of the street and take cover from that sniper!”
Lieutenant Colonel Ali Fadhel -- head of the Najaf Regiment -- spat into
the walkie-talkie he was gripping.

But sometimes we covered developments at the chaotic field clinic on the
edge of the city, or worked on a low-key feature about the mechanics
repairing Humvee engines or replacing windows shattered by IS sniper
fire.

Once we had enough material for the day, we packed up our equipment and
pressed our proverbial rewind button. We switched back from our Humvee
to our civilian car, peeling off our sweat-drenched flak jackets and
pulling out our laptops to begin filing our photos, videos, and text
stories.

We barreled through Gogjali, barely looking up, and breezed through the
checkpoints we had so much trouble getting through earlier that day,
back towards that other universe in Arbil.